The Web simply wouldn't work without links. Hyperlinks are the foundation of hypertext which in turn is the foundation of the Web. People who are afraid to loose visitors by linking out are probably not convinced that they provide quality content, which makes visitors want to come back. February 25, 2009

Another benefit of static URLs is that it's more likely that you can keep your URLs when switching the underlying system. For example, when I converted a Joomla site to Drupal I could keep all static URLs, because both systems support URL rewriting, which is the case for many other CMS and frameworks as well.

One thing you should care about when using a dynamic system with URL rewriting is to redirect your dynamic URLs to the static aliases, to avoid the same content being accessible via two or more different URLs. For Drupal based sites the Global Redirect module (http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect) does this for you. September 24, 2008

What I do for category pages is to set the first category page to index,follow and all subsequent pages are set to noindex,follow to avoid duplicate titles. Would you recommend to have no category pages indexed at all? September 19, 2008

Most of the people who use the Internet are not webmasters themselves, but almost all of them receive spam in some form, e.g. e-mail spam. These people do not care about distinctions such as black hat or white hat SEO.

Many people consider SEOs spammers, because many of those who call themselves SEOs are spammers. This is unjust for those SEOs who do solid work, without spamming others, but it is justified for a significant number of people, who claim to do SEO.

As long as spam is such a huge annoyance, SEO will have a bad reputation. Educating people and reducing the amount of spam can improve this situation. August 19, 2008

I haven't used Live's Webmaster tools so far, because their search engine plays virtually no role in the German market and I am somehow reluctant to use Microsoft services. But this looks really interesting, so maybe I change my mind and give it a try. August 09, 2008

In Germany there are quite a few bloggers who don't link to external pages and not even bother to link to their sources of information.
Not linking other sites is definitely counterproductive. It's bad for credibility and it shows that you haven't understood one of the foundations of the Web, called hypertext. August 05, 2008

Changing includes/joomla.php is a bad idea because your changes may be lost when you install the next update. The fact that you need to hack core files to get your Joomla sites SEO friendly points out one of the main weaknesses if Joomla. You do not have a high level of control over the output. July 18, 2008

Having linguistic knowledge is definitely a benefit when writing. And writers can benefit a lot from the Web as well. The index of a search engine like Google is a giant corpus of mostly real world usage of language. For example, when I write in English, which is not my native language, I often do searches for phrases to check whether they are actually used or to look up the correct prepositions that go with phrasal verbs. July 18, 2008

I know Mambo/Joomla and Drupal very well from a user, admin, and developer perspective. Better SEO, virtually full output control, which allows for valid and semantic markup, and a multi level category system, which features free tagging, were some compelling reasons to switch from Joomla to Drupal 2 years ago.
Many of the SEO needs you mention in your article are met by core Drupal functionality or can be acomplished with existing add-on modules. January 30, 2008